Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “No.” Brady backed up a few steps. “Here. See the angle? The bodies look random now, but you can see the faces.”

  He squinted, wishing he could see the faces better. His eyesight had been growing worse; in 1851 it had been so bad that the press thought he would be blind in a decade. Twelve years had passed and he wasn’t blind yet. But he wasn’t far from it.

  O’Sullivan arranged the black curtain, then Brady swept his assistant aside. “Let me,” he said.

  He climbed under the curtain. The heat was thicker; the familiar scent of chemicals cleared the death from his nose. He peered through the lens. The image was as he had expected it to be, clear, concise, well composed. The light filtered through, reflected oddly through the blue tint on his glasses, and started a sharp ache in his skull. He pulled out, into the sun. “Adjust as you need to. But I think we have the image.”

  Brady turned away from the field as O’Sullivan prepared the wet plate and then shoved it into the camera. Sweat trickled down the back of Brady’s neck into his woolen coat. He was tired, so tired, and the war had already lasted two years longer than anyone expected. He didn’t know how many times he had looked on the faces of the dead, posed them for the camera the way he had posed princes and presidents a few years before. If he had stayed in New York, like the Anthonys, everything would have been different. He could have spent his nights with Julia . . .

  “Got it,” O’Sullivan said. He held the plate gingerly, his face flushed with the heat.

  “You develop it,” Brady said. “I want to stay here for a few minutes.”

  O’Sullivan frowned; Brady usually supervised every step of the battle images. But Brady didn’t explain his unusual behavior. O’Sullivan said nothing. He clutched the plates and went in the back of the black-covered wagon. The wagon rocked ever so gently as he settled in.

  Brady waited until the wagon stopped rocking, then clasped his hands behind his back and walked through the trampled, blood-spattered grass. The aftermath of battle made him restless: the dead bodies, the ruined earth, the shattered wagons. Battles terrified him, made him want to run screaming from the scene. He often clutched his equipment around him like a talisman—if he worked, if he didn’t think about it, he would stave off the fear until the shooting stopped. He tripped over an abandoned canteen. He crouched, saw the bullet hole in its side.

  “You stay, even though it appalls you.”

  The woman’s voice startled him so badly he nearly screamed. He backed up as he stood, and found himself facing a thin, short-haired woman wearing pants, a short-sleeved shirt and (obviously) no undergarments. She looked familiar.

  “That takes courage.” She smiled. Her teeth were even and white.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. His voice shook and he clenched his fists to hide his shaking. “Are you looking for someone in particular? I can take you to the General.”

  “I’m looking for you. You’re the man they call Brady of Broadway?”

  He nodded.

  “The man who sells everything, bargains his studio to photograph a war?”

  Her comment was too close to his own thoughts—and too personal. He felt a flush rise that had nothing to do with the heat. “What do you want?”

  “I want you to work for me, Mathew Brady. I will pay for your equipment, take care of your travel, if you shoot pictures for me when and where I say.”

  She frightened him, a crazy woman standing in a field of dead men. “I run my own business,” he said.

  She nodded, the smile fading just a little. “And it will bankrupt you. You will die forgotten, your work hidden in crates in government warehouses. That’s not why you do this, is it, Mr. Brady.”

  “I do this so that people can see what really happens here, so that people can travel through my memories to see this place,” he said. The ache in his head grew sharper. This woman had no right to taunt him. “I do this for history.”

  “And it’s history that calls you, Mr. Brady. The question is, will you serve?”

  “I already serve,” he snapped—and found himself speaking to air. Heat shimmered in front of him, distorting his view of the field for a moment. Then the tall grass and the broken picket fence returned, corpses hovering at the edge of his vision like bales of hay.

  He took off his glasses and wiped his eyes. The strain was making him hallucinate. He had been too long in the sun. He would go back to the wagon, get a drink of water, lie in the shade. Then, perhaps, the memory of the hallucination would go away.

  But her words haunted him as he retraced his steps. I will pay for your equipment, take care of your travel. If only someone would do that. He had spent the entire sum of his fortune and still saw no end ahead. She hadn’t been an hallucination: she had been a dream. A wish for a different, easier life that no one would ever fulfill.

  1865

  The day after Appomattox—the end of the war, Brady dreamed:

  He walked the halls of a well-lit place he had never seen before. His footsteps echoed on the shiny floor covering. Walls, made of a smooth material that was not wood or stone, smelled of paint and emollients. Ceiling boxes encased the lamps—and the light did not flicker but flowed cleaner than gaslight. Most of the doors lining the hallway were closed, but one stood open. A sign that shone with a light of its own read:

  MATHEW B. BRADY EXHIBIT

  OFFICIAL PHOTOGRAPHER:

  UNITED STATES CIVIL WAR

  (1861-1865)

  Inside, he found a spacious room twice the size of any room he had ever seen, with skylights in the ceiling and Doric columns creating a hollow in the center. A camera, set up on its tripod, had its black curtain thrown half back, as if waiting for him to step inside. Next to it stood his wagon, looking out of place and ancient without its horse. The wagon’s back door also stood open, and Brady saw the wooden boxes of plates inside, placed neatly, so that a path led to the darkroom. The darkroom looked odd: no one had picked up the sleeping pallets, and yet the chemical baths sat out, ready for use. He would never have left the wagon that way. He shook his head, and turned toward the rest of the room.

  Three of the long, wide walls were bare. On the fourth, framed pictures crowded together. He walked to them, saw that they were his portraits, his work from Bull Run, Antietam, Gettysburg. He even saw a picture of General Lee in his confederate gray. Beneath the portrait, the attribution read By Brady (or assistant), but Brady had never taken such a portrait, never developed one, never posed one. A chill ran up his back when he realized he hadn’t squinted to read the print. He reached up, touched the bridge of his nose. His glasses were gone. He hadn’t gone without glasses since he had been a boy. In the mornings, he had to grab his glasses off the nightstand first, then get out of bed.

  His entire wartime collection (with huge gaps) framed, on exhibit. Four thousand portraits, displayed for the world to see, just as he had hoped. He reached out to the Lee portrait. As his finger brushed the smooth wood—

  ― he found himself beneath the large tree next to the Appomattox farmhouse, where the day before, Lee and Grant had signed the peace treaty. The farmhouse was a big white blur against the blue of the April sky. He grabbed his glasses (somehow they had fallen to his lap) and hooked the frames around his ears. The world came into sharper focus, the bluetint easing the glare of the sun. He knew what he had to do. Even though he had arrived too late to photograph the historic signing of the treaty, he could still photograph General Lee one last time in his uniform.

  Brady got up and brushed the grass off his pants. His wagon stood beside the farmhouse. The wagon looked proper—dust-covered, mud-spattered, with a few splintered boards and a cock-eyed wheel that he would have to fix very soon—not clean and neat as it had in his dream. The horse, tied to another tree, looked tired, but he would push her with him to Richmond, to General Lee, to complete the exhibit.

  Three empty walls, he thought as he went to find his assistant. He wondered why his earlier portraits weren’t mounted there. P
erhaps the walls awaited something else. Something better.

  1866

  Brady held his nephew Levin’s shoulders and propelled him toward the door. The ticket taker at the desk in the lobby of the New York Historical Society waved them past.

  “How many today, John?” Brady asked.

  “We had a few paying customers yesterday,” the large man said, “but they all left after looking at the first wall.”

  Brady nodded. The society had said they would close the exhibit of his war portraits if attendance didn’t go up. But despite the free publicity in the illustrated newspapers and the positive critical response, the public was not attending.

  Levin had already gone inside. He stood, hands behind his back, and stared at the portraits of destruction he had been too young to remember. Brady had brought Levin to the exhibit to discourage the boy and make him return to school. He had arrived a few days before, declaring that he wanted to be a photographer like his Uncle Mat. Brady had said twelve was too young to start learning the trade, but Julia had promised Levin a place to stay if no one demanded that he return to school. So far, no one had.

  Brady went inside too. The lighting was poor, and the portraits were scattered on several small walls. No Doric columns, no wide empty spaces. This was a cramped showing, like so many others he had had, but it shared the emptiness of the gallery in his dreams.

  He stared at the portraits, knowing them by heart. They ran in order, from the first glorious parade down Pennsylvania Avenue—taken from his Washington studio—to the last portrait of Lee after Appomattox. Each portrait took him back to the sights and sounds of the moment: the excitement of the parade, the disgust at the carnage, the hopelessness in Lee’s eyes. It was here: the recent past, recorded as faithfully as a human being could. One of his reviewers had said that Brady had captured time and held it prisoner in his little glass plates. He certainly did in his mind. Sometimes all it took was a smell—decaying garbage, horse sweat—and he was back on the battlefield, fighting to live while he took his portraits.

  From outside the door, he heard the murmur of voices. He turned in time to see John talking to a woman in widow’s weeds. John pointed at Brady. Brady smiled and nodded, knowing he was being identified as the artist behind the exhibit.

  The woman pushed open the glass doors and stood in front of Brady. She was slight and older than he expected—in her forties or fifties—with deep lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

  “I’ve come to plead with you, Mr. Brady,” she said. Her voice was soft. “I want you to take these portraits away. Over there, you have an image of my husband’s body, and in the next room, I saw my son. They’re dead, Mr. Brady, and I buried them. I want to think about how they lived, not how they died.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Brady said. He didn’t turn to see which portraits she had indicated. “I didn’t mean to offend you. These portraits show what war really is, and I think it’s something we need to remember lest we try it again.”

  Levin had stopped his movement through the gallery. He hadn’t turned toward the conversation, but Brady could tell the boy was listening from the cocked position of his head.

  “We’ll remember, Mr. Brady,” the woman said. She smoothed her black skirt. “My whole family has no choice.”

  She turned her back and walked out, her steps firm and proud. The street door closed sharply behind her. John got up from his chair.

  “You’ve gotten this before,” Brady said.

  “Every day,” John said. “People want to move forward, Mathew. They don’t need more reminders of the past.”

  Brady glanced at his nephew. Levin had moved into one of the back rooms. “Once Levin is done looking at the exhibit, I’ll help you remove it,” Brady said. “No sense hurting your business to help mine.”

  He sighed and glanced around the room. Four years of work. Injured associates, ruined equipment, lost wealth, and a damaged business. He had expected acclaim, at least, if not a measure of additional fame. One of his mother’s aphorisms rose in his mind: a comment she used to make when he would come inside, covered with dirt and dung. “How the mighty hath fallen,” she’d say. She had never appreciated his dreams nor had she lived long enough to see them come true. Now her shade stood beside him, as clearly as she had stood on the porch so many years ago, and he could hear the “I-told-you-so” in her voice.

  He shook the apparition away. What his mother had never realized was that the mighty had farther to fall.

  1871

  That morning, he put on his finest coat, his best hat, and he kissed Julia with a passion he hadn’t shown in years. She smiled at him, her eyes filled with tears, as she held the door open for him. He stepped into the hallway, and heard the latch snick shut behind him. Nothing looked different: the gas lamps had soot marks around the base of the chimneys; the flowered wallpaper peeled in one corner; the stairs creaked as he stepped on them, heading down to the first floor and the street. Only he felt different: the shuddery bubble in his stomach, the tension in his back, the lightheadedness threatening the sureness of his movements.

  He stopped on the first landing and took a breath of the musty hotel air. He wondered what they would think of him now, all the great men he had known. They came back to him, like battlefield ghosts haunting a general. Samuel Morse, his large dark eyes snapping, his gnarled hands holding the daguerreotypes, his voice echoing in the room, teaching Brady that photography would cause a revolution—a revolution, boy!—and he had to ride the crest.

  “I did,” Brady whispered. His New York studio, so impressive in the 1850s, had a portrait of Morse hanging near the door for luck. Abraham Lincoln had gazed at that portrait. So had his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Presidents, princes, actors, assassins had all passed through Brady’s door. And he, in his arrogance, had thought his work art, not commerce. Art and history demanded his presence at the first Battle of Bull Run. Commerce had demanded he stay home, take carte de visites, imperials, and portraits of soldiers going off to war, of families about to be destroyed, of politicians, great and small.

  No. He had left his assistants to do that, while he spent their earnings, his fortune, and his future chasing a dream.

  And this morning, he would pay for that dream.

  So simple, his attorney told him. He would sign his name to a paper, declare bankruptcy, and the government would apportion his assets to his remaining creditors. He could still practice his craft, still attempt to repay his debts, still live, if someone wanted to call that living.

  He adjusted his jacket one final time and stepped into the hotel’s lobby. The desk clerk called out his customary good morning, and Brady nodded. He would show no shame, no anger. The doorman opened the door and cool, manure-tinged air tickled Brady’s nostrils. He took a deep breath and walked into the bustle of the morning: Mathew Brady, photographer. A man who had joked with Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, and James Buchanan. A man who had raised a camera against bullets, who had held more dead and dying than half the physicians on the battlefield. Brady pushed forward, touching the brim of his hat each time he passed a woman, nodding at the gentlemen as if the day were the best in his life. Almost everyone had seen his work, in the illustrated papers, in the exhibits, in the halls of Congress itself. He had probably photographed the sons of most of the people who walked these streets. Dead faces, turned toward the sun.

  The thought sobered him. These people had lost husbands, fathers, children. Losses greater than his. And they had survived, somehow. Somehow.

  He held the thought as he made his way through the morning, listening to the attorney mumble, the government officials drone on, parceling out his possessions like clothing at an orphan’s charity. The thought carried him out the door, and back onto the street before the anger burst through the numbness:

  The portraits were his children. He and Julia had none—and he had nothing else. Nothing else at all.

  “Now, are you ready to work with me?”

>   The female voice was familiar enough that he knew who he would see before he looked up: the crazy woman who haunted him, who wanted him to give everything he could to history.

  As if he hadn’t given enough.

  She stood before him, the winter sunlight backlighting her and hiding her features in shadow. The Washington crowd walked around her, unseeing, as if she were no more than a post blocking the path.

  “And what do I get if I help you?” he asked, his voice sounding harsher than he had ever heard it.

  “Notice. Acclaim. Pictures on walls instead of buried in warehouses. The chance to make a very real difference.”

  He glanced back at the dark wooden door, at the moving figures faint in the window, people who had buried his art, given it to the Anthonys, separated it and segregated it and declared it worthless. His children, as dead as the ones he had photographed.

  “And you’ll pay my way?” he asked.

  “I will provide your equipment and handle your travel, if you take photographs for me when and where I say.”

  “Done,” he said, extending a hand to seal the bargain, thinking a crazy, mannish woman like this one would close a deal like a gentleman. She took his hand, her palm soft, unused to work, and as she shook, the world whirled. Colors and pain and dust bombarded him. Smells he would briefly catch and by the time he identified them disappeared. His head ached, his eyes throbbed, his body felt as if it were being torn in fifteen different directions. And when they stopped, he was in a world of blackness, where hot rain fell like fire from the sky.

  “I need you to photograph this,” she said, and then she disappeared. In her place, his wagon stood, the only friend in a place of strangeness. The air smelled of burning buildings, of sticky wet, of decay. Death. He recognized it from the battlefields years ago. The horizon was black, dotted with orange flame. The trees rose stunted against the oppression. People—Orientals, he realized with some amazement—ran by him, their strange clothing ripped and torn, their faces burned, peeling, shining with the strange heat. They made no sound as they moved: all he heard was the rain slapping against the road.